The following invention relates to a driving network for a TFEL panel, and in particular, to a driving network which includes a video frame capture buffer for flat panels having split screen architecture to increase the video bandwidth and to allow for higher frame refresh rates without changing the video input frame rate.
Thin film electroluminescent (TFEL) panels include orthonogonal sets of scanning and data electrodes sandwiching a thin film electroluminescent laminate structure to produce light at pixel points defined by the field-of-view intersections of the scanning and data electrodes. These panels, like conventional cathode ray tubes, accept a conventional video data signal. Because of the way in which a CRT is scanned, the video data is serially input, and the conventional frame repetition rate for this serial input is usually around 60 cycles per second. TFEL screens, however, need not accept the limitation of serially input video data because with some screen architectures, data may be written onto the screen in two or more places simultaneously. An example of such screen architecture is shown in Dolinar, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,739,320 entitled ENERGY-EFFICIENT SPLIT-ELECTRODE TFEL PANEL. In this device the data electrodes are divided into top and bottom sets of complimentary pairs which extend slightly less than halfway across the screen towards each other. With this architecture, top and bottom halves of the panel may be written simultaneously. Writing different sections of the panel simultaneously can effectively lower the required data rate for the panel driver ICs. This is because it takes less time to write a complete frame.